GrafoDexia

This site is devoted to copyright and issues of 'intellectual property,' particularly the issue's analytical aspects. It also concerns itself with the gap between public perception and the true facts, and with the significant lag time between the coverage on more technical sites and the mainstream press.
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To see the list of sites monitored to create this site, see: http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=CopyrightJournal

More on Grouper

Received today as an anonymous comment:This is the first we have heard anything of the RIAA going after Grouper. No one from the RIAA has contacted us in any way. No news is good news as far as we are concerned. Grouper's founders, Dave and Josh, began their careers in the entertainment industry and Internet radio. They went on to create Spinner, which was the first company to bring multiple channels of music to the Internet. Spinner worked with the RIAA, and, over time, fellow media companies, to help develop and then adhere to new laws that protect copyright holders and still encourage innovation. Given this history, Dave and Josh are committed to protecting the rights of copyright holders, consistent with the privilege of fair use. This perspective has greatly influenced execution of the company’s core mission, which is to enable efficient and safe sharing among family and friends.

From the Chicago Tribune Article:<< In addition to limiting the size of groups and accessibility, they say, their program requires songs to be streamed--that is, played through the Internet--not downloaded.Those limits may not add up to a legal service, argues Nicolas Firth, chairman of BMG Music Publishing Worldwide."I'm not so sure that I see a big distinction between this and, say, Grokster because you're at 30 people," Firth said. "Where are you going to draw the line at what constitutes unlicensed use of copyrighted music?" >>

More of BBC CA.http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_04_17_fosblogarchive.html#111386304251189216

The RIAA is going after Grouper, something clearly intended as SNIU. Particularly interesting since the Grokster trial largely centered around intent.http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0504160095apr16,1,4458442.story?ctrack=1&cset=trueThe entertainment industry may be taking issue with yet another file-swapping program: This time it's Grouper, a system that lets people create their own peer-to-peer networks of 30 or fewer people. Grouper doesn't let its users download MP3s or search for files on other people's private networks, but some industry lawyers say they still consider the software a useful tool for music and movie pirates.

Fired for legal activity. A casualty in the RIAA's unsubtle definition of filesharing. As such things as this and ISP crackdowns on all P2P traffic, are we creating a new kind of orphan work, one which results from ignorance of the details of the law? Confusion can be powerful--self-censorship often takes tolls far beyond what official censorship would truly punish. Witness the Saving Private Ryan cancellation in the wake of the Janet Jackson episode.

P2P and the rule of law. I've been shocked in the past by people who I know are major infringers--to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of movies and thousands of songs, who spend hours upon hours collecting content--argue vehemently that things like pirating only works more than 28 years old (Founder's copyright) would be morally wrong. It's a strange view that argues for acceptance of the RIAA theme of "all piracy is bad for society and thus wrong," even among those who defy the conclusion, "therefore don't share." Another odd example, Penn's ITAs put up posters saying "Your mother taught you to share; your mother was wrong." I always thought those posters were a potent reflection of the weakness of the RIAA's fundamental argument, and that filesharing was a brilliant term, reflecting a need to do a better job of owning the terminology in the debate. "Filesharing" not "piracy," "infringers" not "pirates."--Ari

Update from Freenet

Posted to the Freenet announce group. One of my favorite projects is moving along again. --Ari

-----------------------------People could be forgiven for thinking that the project had somewhat stagnated given the lack of activity on these mailing lists, so I wanted to provide an update because this could hardly be further from the truth.

Oskar Sandberg, Matthew, and I have been developing some ideas for 0.7 which represent an even more fundamental architectural shift than have been proposed to-date, and which should address one of the most fundamental shortcomings of Freenet as it relates to Freenet's usage in a hostile environment, and which I believe represents a significant new innovation in the P2P-space.

As most people will be aware, Oskar was one of the core Freenet developers in the first few years of the project. He is now working on a PhD in Mathematics. Over the past few months he and I have been collaborating on gaining a much deeper mathematical understanding of how Freenet does what it does. While this work is far from complete, it has given us some extremely useful insights and much more confidence in determining what aspects of Freenet's design work well, which don't, and why.

To understand the new idea, I should start with some theoretical background. Consider a simple "graph". A graph in the mathematical sense consists of a set of nodes, some of which are connected to each-other. At this stage nodes don't have a position in space, all we know or care about them is which nodes are connected to each-other. We can assume that connections are bi-directional.

The "diameter" of a graph is the minimum number of nodes you must go through to get from any one particular node to any other particular node in the graph. Note that it may not be easy to find this path, but the important thing is that it exists.

There is a mathematical result which tells us what kind of graphs have a small diameter. Basically imagine we have three nodes, A is connected to B, and A is also connected to C. The mathematical result says that if, given that both are connected to A, there is an increased probability that B is connected to C, then the graph will have a small diameter.

So, if we have a graph that has this property then we know that we *can* get from any one node to another in a small number of steps, but we don't necessarily know *how*.

Now imagine that each node in the graph has a position in space, this can be 1 dimensional, 2 dimensional, 20 dimensional space, it doesn't matter too much. Imagine that we want to get from one particular node in this graph to another particular node. A simple approach is, from our starting node, go to whichever node we are connected to is closest to the node we want to get to. This approach will work quickly in a graph that is a "small world". In essence, a small world graph is where there is a higher probability that nodes which are close together are connected than nodes which are far apart.

In the ideal case, the probability that two nodes are connected is proportional to 1/(d^n) where d is the distance between them, and n is the number of dimensions in the space in which our nodes reside. This mathematical result is due to Kleinberg.

A small-world graph therefore not only has a small diameter, but provides an efficient means to find it.

Anyway, back to the story. One of Freenet's weaknesses in terms of its usefulness in a hostile environment, is that while its goal is to make it very difficult to determine who is publishing and reading what, it doesn't make it all that difficult to determine who is running a Freenet node. This could be problematic in a situation where the act of running a Freenet node is itself sufficient to incur the wrath of one's oppressors. Those oppressors can just harvest Freenet node addresses one by one, it wouldn't be easy, but it wouldn't be impossible either.

The only real way to address this is to limit the nodes your Freenet node talks to to people whom you are confident are not working on behalf of your oppressor. In effect this is the same idea employed by "darknets", but the problem with darknets is that they don't scale. We are talking about a darknet that could potentially scale to millions of users.

Initially it was felt that NGR would allow us to do this, but when, based on Oskar's and my research, we realised how fundamental the network topology is to the small world principal, we felt that we wouldn't be able to maintain a small world link structure if we weren't able to automatically create links to new nodes.

But then we remembered that human relationships already tend to form small-world networks (this is the origin of the whole small world idea), this was a key realisation. If we have a network created by linking people who know each-other, we know that the network will have a small diameter, simply because that is how human relationships work (ie. if I know John, and I know Fred, then there is a greater probability that John knows Fred than of two randomly selected people knowing each-other).

But, for a network of low-diameter to be useful, we need to turn it into a small world network, and this means each node in the network needs a "position" in space such that Kleinberg's topology holds. Our first thought was that NGR might be able to do this. Matthew has been running some experiments to test this theory, and results so-far have been promising but not yet conclusive.

Meanwhile Oskar and I have been testing some alternative algorithms for achieving this should NGR fail to do what we need it to do. We have also had some success in this regard, but again, nothing conclusive yet.

Assuming we can find a good algorithm for assigning positions or "identities" to nodes, we are in a pretty good situation as we can now efficiently route requests for data in our globally scalable darknet.

Anyway, that is where things stand right now - as can be seen it is still a work in progress, but I hope people agree that this is an exciting and promising new direction for Freenet that remains true to Freenet's ultimate goals. If successful, Freenet will be a globally scalable darknet and will be resistant to a whole class of "harvesting" attacks.

Lastly, however, I need to point out that our current funding situation is not healthy, as anyone can see by looking at the website. As a result, if anyone out there wants to support this effort, and many already have, then please visit the website and make a donation so that Matthew doesn't starve while he works on this stuff.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Presidential piracy. "The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign." A nice illustration of just how far the social norms campaign of the RIAA has to go.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Grokster transcript

It's a good read, actually. My favorite exerpt is a little dig that Taranto gets in at the MGM lawyer: Page 38MR. TARANTO: Let me suggest why that's not odd17 and why the cases are not just different, but critically18 different. Napster rests -- never mind the exact words of19 the opinion -- Napster involves something more than20 distribution of a product. Napster, the company, was21 sending out, in response to requests, "Where is this22 filed," an answer, the information, "The file is here."23 Every time it sent out that information, if it had been24 told by Mr. Verrilli's client, "That file may not be25 shared," it was, with specific knowledge to that file, giving assistance.

Note line 24, pointing out Verrilli's former affiliation with Napster itself.

untitled

href="http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is296a-2/s05/pdf/GroksterOA.pdf">MGM v. Grokster transcript is out. They really do seem to be arguing for an active infringement doctrine. MGM lawyer: "It's not just the absence of commercially significant noninfringing uses that demonstrates contributory infringement."

href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2005/04/07/the_death_of_the_stereotype_that_libraries_books_only.html">Article on libraries/digital info. There's another point here, though, that the same high-thoroghput techniques they intimate will spread because of Google could bring about a bloom of P2P piracy of books.

href="http://www.twice.com/article/CA515667.html?display=Breaking+News">Nearly 50% of infringers use networks other than P2P. This is a huge finding.

href="http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000807038942/">LATimes argues that CDs make more sense than DRM. Could this be the real goal of DRM on CD? To prevent the analogy to the old way of doing things as the Industry argues for greater control?

href="http://www.thespartandaily.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/04/4251f60871a6d">"It was like winning the lottery, but backwards," Vique said, referring to the odds of being targeted among millions of users.

href="http://www.netmag.co.uk/features/default.asp?pagetypeid=2&articleid=35051&subsectionid=511&subsubsectionid=220">Video on Demand.

href="http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/2005/04/05/new_york_common_law_copyright_protects_50year_old_sound_recordings.php">NY High Court upholds what amounts to an extension of copyright.

href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/05/MNGM6C3CB31.DTL">SNIU from the man who invented the Internet? "The new network, planned for an Aug. 1 premiere, will enable Internet users to send video content through the online system "to help us make the viewer-created content that will be a large and growing part of what we put on the air," Gore said. "

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Audio recording

In light of the recent WinAmp/Napster controversy, here are some utilities that can be used to exploit what amounts to something in between an analog loophole and a digital one, but what's commonly known as the principle of fair use of equipment the consumer buys:Rogue Abmoeba's software.

More on the real pirates."Most people I spoke to later agreed that, if one followed the money-and-production trail all the way back, one would eventually arrive at the [Chinese] government—although which government, local, regional, or national, was a question."